Ram Rod - The High And Mighty

These days, the automakers work hard on their street cred. They spend lots of time and money persuading consumers that the people who design and build their products are real car guys with a passion for performance. But at the Chrysler Corp. in 1958, no posturing was necessary. Over in engineering, the company had an entire crew of speed-happy maniacs it couldn't beat back with a stick.

These young gearheads were graduates of the Chrysler Institute's class of 1957, its largest ever, and naturally, they were crazy about drag racing. Every day at lunch-in the Highland Park engineering cafeteria, at a long table near the windows-they gathered to bench race and trade ideas. Some of the guys had hot street cars they raced on Woodward Avenue and at the strip. Tom Hoover ran a '57 Plymouth with a 392 Hemi and a homebuilt tuned-port setup, while Wayne Erickson had pieced together a replica of the A311 race Hemi (a factory-experimental engine developed for the Indy 500) for the '53 Dodge he raced in C/Gas. Since it was simply the done thing among hot rodders at the time, they decided to form their own car club. Chrysler employees and Mopar loyalists to a man, they invented the name "Ram Chargers."

Ram Chargers was originally two words-"Ram" for Dodge and "Chargers" for Chrysler's work with ram tuning. But due to sloppy copy editing in the hot-rod press, the two words became one, and the club decided it was easier to go along than to reverse the mistake. So they became known as the Ramchargers, and contrary to popular belief, the club never protected the name. Over the years, the Ramcharger brand would be applied to a Michigan auto parts chain and a rust-prone SUV, but the original members never saw a dime from it.

In late 1958, the members, then numbering 21, decided to pool their resources to build a club car for drag racing only-no compromises for street use. They may have been young hot rodders, but they were also trained engineers. They approached the project like scientists, dividing themselves into committees with group leaders and clear lines of command. Tom Hoover and Skip McCully chaired the engine committee; Herman Mozer directed the body group. The chassis program was headed by Troy Simonsen, while suspension, steering, and traction were managed by Dick Burke and Fred Gluckson. "That was the beauty of it," Dick Burke says. "It was run like any formal engineering program." After careful study of the NHRA rule book, the team decided to attack the Altered categories. For their car, they made a strange but shrewd choice: a '49 Plymouth three-window business coupe. It was no thing of beauty, but it was light and had the shortest wheelbase of any postwar Mopar. The odd little coupe became the starting point for one of the most unusual and innovative drag-racing cars ever built.

In the late '50s, by far the limiting factor in dragstrip performance was traction. Slicks were primitive, offering very little grip, and quarter-mile chassis science was in its infancy. "Drag racing grew out of the dry lakes and Bonneville, where it was all about keeping the car low to the ground for wind resistance and handling," Hoover says. But the Ramchargers were Michigan boys who didn't share any of those traditions. All they had to guide them was their engineering degrees. "We approached it as a simple problem in physics," Hoover says. "Accelerate a vehicle over a fixed distance in the minimum elapsed time."

So the Ram Rod, as the car was first called, would depart from hot-rod practice and go in a totally new direction: straight up. The chassis was jacked up more than a foot over stock, raising the vehicle's center of gravity for maximum load transfer under acceleration to shift the car's weight onto the rear tires for maximum forward bite. To elevate the car's mass even higher, the driveline was raised in the chassis until the crankshaft was a full 3 feet off the pavement. But while the approach may have been basic physics, these radical modifications gave the car an appearance unlike anything else on the dragstrip at the time-like something from another planet. To reduce the car's frontal area, the Ramchargers chopped the top more than 4 inches. That got the car back down out of the wind a bit, but it made the coupe look even more bizarre.

To bias even more weight onto the slicks, the rear axle was relocated 1011/42 inches forward by whacking the framerails just ahead of the kick-up and moving everything to the front. Then extensions were welded to the frame to support the rear of the body. This modification also shortened the wheelbase to 10111/42 inches, further increasing weight transfer. A half-dozen years later, this very same trick would be applied to Chrysler's '65 factory altered-wheelbase racers. Their strange appearance would earn them the name Funny Cars.

The Plymouth also featured what may have been the first adjustable four-bar rear suspension in a drag car. For inspiration, the chassis committee drew from the Jaguar XJC, one of the last great live-axle sports racers. But with a twist: According to Ramcharger Bill Shope, the Ram Rod used a telescoping left upper link. The setup was intended to work as an offset three-link on acceleration, reverting to a conventional four-link under braking, when the slip-link bottomed out. With the lousy tires available, they had to maximize traction however they could. Since any uneven distribution of load between an axle pair will reduce the total grip of the pair, counteracting driveline torque was a top priority. And the rear suspension worked well-too well according to Shope: On its first full run under power, the car got up on two wheels and bicycled off the starting line. "The NHRA people had never seen a car do anything like that, and they made it clear they did not ever want to see it again," Shope says. So the boys ran a bolt through the slip joint, converting the rear suspension back into a standard four-link.

With the stock Plymouth suspension in the front, coil springs from an old torque-tube Buick (the softest they could find) were installed out back. "All the rear springs did was hold the body off the ground," Burke says. "The roll couple was all to the rear, none in the front. Anything to get the rear tires to grip the pavement." The crew continued to work with the four-link's wide range of adjustments until the grip was equal on both rear tires. "That's when we knew we had it perfect," Burke says. "With the car going forward dead level and two nice black streaks of equal length on the pavement. Not smoke, but about 6 feet of black rubber. That showed we were really biting into the pavement."

The Ram Rod's engine was a 354 Hemi salvaged from warranty returns. Some 392 heads were installed for their larger intake valves, along with a '58 Chrysler 300D cam, but beyond that, the engine was surprisingly stock-internally. Externally, it was another story. Using their experience in pressure-wave tuning (as it is called today), the Ramchargers created unique intake and exhaust systems for the Ram Rod. The intake manifold-probably the first tunnel-ram ever seen on a drag car-arose from the development work that produced the ram-tuned SonoRamic Commando '60-'61 Plymouths. Two Carter four-barrels and a fabricated airscoop rested atop the tall structure, towering over the coupe's roof line. The wild exhaust megaphones were apparently inspired by a Norton motorcycle technical paper. They were 48 inches long with eight divergent cones streaming from the fenderwells instead of collectors. Who knows how well the pipes worked, but everyone agreed they were mighty loud. "It was actually intimidating to the other racers," Burke remembers. "We always had the loudest car out there, including the dragsters."

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10/16The innovative four-bar rear suspension, perhaps the first ever built for drag racing, was designed by Ramcharger Bill Shope. The trailing links were 2331/44 inches long, while the geometry was almost infinitely adjustable.

The Ramchargers debuted the Ram Rod at the '59 NHRA Nationals in Detroit, breaking in the engine in the inspection line. Not quite prepared for national competition, they lost to Billie Rasmussen's '32 Ford coupe for C/Altered honors, though they did set top speed for the class at 109.75 mph. A series of drivers handled the car, among them Herm Mozer and Jim Thornton, as the Ramchargers campaigned around the Midwest, setting the C/A national record. By the next year's Nationals, they had the car running in the high 11s at 117 mph, easily winning their class. The Ram Rod now sported rear fenders, a sponsor on the doors, and a coat of fresh white paint over the hideous blue-green primer it had worn the year before. And somewhere along the way, with its ridiculous ride height, shattering performance, and ear-piercing exhaust blast, the car had earned a new nickname: the High and Mighty.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Ramchargers' demonstrated expertise with high performance was quickly tapped by Chrysler, as the company attacked the growing youth market of the early '60s. With factory support over the next decade, the Ramchargers' Dodges won in Super Stock, Funny Car, and even Top Fuel. Club members, including Tom Hoover and Dick Maxwell, rose through the corporate ranks as Chrysler expanded its presence in musclecars, drag racing, and NASCAR. But tragically, one of the founding team members didn't get to take the ride with his buddies. Wayne Erickson was fatally burned at the NHRA Nationals when a flywheel explosion in his '53 Dodge slashed the fuel lines. "It was horrible. He lived for 12 days," Hoover says. "He was my best friend." After 47 years, Hoover still chokes up.

The original High and Mighty disappeared years ago. The car you see today is a re-creation performed by members of the Chrysler Employees Motorsports Association. Organized much like the Ramchargers, the club is made up of Chrysler employees but operates unofficially within the company. Volunteers led by chairman Bob Lees spent more than two years rebuilding a Plymouth coupe into an accurate replica of the Ram Rod as it appeared in 1959. They call their car the High and Mighty II.